In Mary's words:
 
Choosing the Island “through the warp and woof of time” Women who made twentieth century Prince Edward Island their home explores, analyzes, and records the lives of five immigrant women - Elsie Sark, Elaine Harrison, Joan Colborne, Janina Zielinski, and Erica Rutherford - and their rapport with their Island through their auto/biographical endeavours. Although work has been done on Elaine Harrison and Erica Rutherford, and to some extent on Elsie Sark, there has been little on Joan Colborne and even less, if any at all, on Janina Zielinski.
The inspiration for this book has arisen from my previous studies of the diaries of L.M. Montgomery (“Veils and Gaps: Women's Life Writing in Early 20th Century Prince Edward Island,” unpublished licentiate thesis) and those of less prominent Island women (In the Interval of the Wave: Prince Edward Island Women's Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Life Writing, McGill-Queen's University Press, 2014).
My research, conference papers, and publications have resulted in a strong desire to look deeper into the lives and writing of women immigrants and their impact on the Island. Furthermore, the sense of affinity with them, being an emigrant from PEI to Europe, gave me the motivation to explore, through these five women, how they felt and fared in a new place. Their diaries, poetry, paintings, letters, autobiographies, and biographies have provided a point of departure for studying their lives and their action on numerous fronts, for example: the arts, their community engagement, gardening, teaching, all of which reveal how they became part of the Island fabric.